Out-of-form Kohli and Rohit can't be jettisoned, compared to Ashwin, due to lack of competition

A little over two months back, Virat Kohli became just the fourth Indian batter to complete 9,000 Test runs. VVS Laxman didn’t get to that milestone, nor did Virender Sehwag, Sourav Ganguly or Cheteshwar Pujara, Kohli’s worthy colleague and contemporary. Ahead of him in that elite list are only Sunil Gavaskar, Rahul Dravid and, nearly 7,000 runs ahead, Sachin Tendulkar.

Let’s take a pause and reflect on that. Kohli has 9,166 Test runs at the time of writing, and yet he is only 57.57% of the way to equalling Tendulkar’s humongous mark of 15,921 runs. At one point some five years back, he was touted as most likely to shatter most of the records held by the little man. He might have become the first to 50 One-Day International centuries, but many other Tendulkar marks are a fair distance away.

But Kohli isn’t chasing his hero, as appealing as that might be to context-seekers, just as R Ashwin didn’t chase his hero, Anil Kumble, India’s leading Test wicket-taker. For the time being, Kohli is chasing runs. He is chasing form. He is chasing redemption. And to achieve each of those chases, ironically enough, he must stop chasing – the ball pitched outside his off-stump, that is.

It’s a ball that has troubled batters of all quality from the time the sport has been played. There’s no shame, really, to be dismissed, caught by the wicketkeeper or in the slip cordon, from time to time. But when ‘time to time’ snowballs into a cluster of repeated outs to low scores in the same fashion, an unmistakable pattern begins to emerge that is impossible to ignore.

Also Read | Kohli’s unchecked downward spiral explodes aura around the King

Kohli has long ceased to be the absolute monarch of the batting world he was for five long years between 2014 and 2019. He still dazzles occasionally, but the regularity has dipped, the aura around him at the batting crease is fading. His average has dipped from the mid-50s to the late 40s. And yet, his is still the scalp most coveted, the wicket most sought after by every opposing team.

How much of a rope is long enough for Rohit and Kohli?

Rohit Sharma hasn’t electrified the Test arena like his predecessor did. After a rip-roaring start to his career that included hundreds in his first two Test innings, he fought losing battles with consistency and looked set to sign off as a white-ball legend alone before being given a fresh lease of life by Kohli and Ravi Shastri in October 2019 when he reprised his limited-overs role and started to open the batting. Within two innings, he showed how much at home he was in that new position; a year and a half later in England, he batted like he had opened the Test innings all his life. He learnt to leave balls, he mastered the art of letting the bowlers bowl at him once they realised that the flirt outside off wasn’t forthcoming. During that series, he registered his first overseas hundred and promised many more in time to come.

Until the middle of September, Rohit delivered on that promise but in the last three months, the runs simply won’t come. Only one fifty in 13 innings, none in his last seven, a shift in the batting order to No. 6. None of this is encouraging.

Yet, for all their recent travails, Kohli and Rohit aren’t just India’s most experienced and prolific batters in this line-up, they are also among the best batters in the country, the two highest run-makers among active Test batters (Pujara and Ajinkya Rahane both have more Test runs than Rohit, but neither has played a five-day game for the country in the last 17 months).

The question therefore is, how long does one wait for the two to turn things around? How much of a rope is long enough?

Also Read | Ashwin: A constant innovator for whom cricket was the be-all and end-all

The temptation to view them through the same prism as Ashwin might be overwhelming because their careers overlapped for the most part. Ashwin hung up his boots once it was clear that he wasn’t guaranteed a place in a Test outside Asia – in the last two and a half years, he played a mere five games when India travelled outside the subcontinent – but that was only because when India played only one spinner, Ravindra Jadeja’s superior all-round package was more appealing to those who decided on the playing XI. Washington Sundar’s surprise recall after three and a half years and his subsequent success with the ball against New Zealand in Pune and Mumbai lent another option on that front, which meant there was no way Ashwin could take his place for granted.

Rohit and Kohli face little competition in Test team

That’s not to say that Kohli and Rohit can. But while there are competent spin resources who can and have been preferred to Ashwin, are there enough batting resources to step into the shoes of the two right-hand batters? Shubman Gill has been around for four years now, his highest score in his last nine Tests and 16 innings in England, West Indies, South Africa and Australia combined is 36. Yashasvi Jaiswal is a mere 17 months young in Test cricket. He made 171 and 57 in his first two Test innings against West Indies but if you take out his 161 in the second innings in Perth, he has just 120 runs in his last 10 Test innings away from home. Rishabh Pant is gradually working his way into Test cricket after his terrible accident of December 2022. And after a stop-start career, KL Rahul is finally beginning to string together a run of scores despite yo-yoing Nos. 6, 4 and 2.

These are among the best batters in the country in the five-day game and yet each is at a critical stage of their careers. And there is a yawning gap between these six and the rest of the chasing pack – Sarfaraz Khan, Devdutt Padikkal, Dhruv Jurel, maybe Abhimanyu Easwaran and even Rajat Patidar.

Also Read | Rohit: Latest failure at Gabba pushes India skipper to deep depths of despondency

India therefore can’t afford to jettison Rohit and/or Kohli in a rush because one suspects that at 37 and 36 respectively, they may not be able to stage a comeback. That alone can’t be the reason for them to continue in the Test match scheme of things, of course. Which begs the question – are they among the best six or seven batters in the country right now in the five-day game? One would have to say an emphatic yes, no matter how disappointing their recent numbers.

But they need to start setting an example, they need to carry the others around them, they need to infuse the confidence in the Gills and the Jaiswals and the Pants to bat with freedom and confidence and to express themselves because their responsibility extends beyond individual contributions with the bat. But individual contributions with the bat are non-negotiable, and that will remain the bottom line.